Your website will often be the first impression your prospective Spanish diners get of you.
And the description of the dishes on your menus, the first impression of the food you lovingly make. But I —and probably you— have read terribly off-putting things on translated menus. If you haven’t, here’s a post on why menu translations go terribly wrong.
If you’re thinking of translating your restaurant website and menus into Spanish to attract and help prospective diners, it’s a good idea —provided you do it well. Remember that first impressions count!
The same as Michelin chefs and home cooks don’t have the same level of knowledge and skills, culinary translations call for a specialist culinary translator. Heard of that famous chef’s cookbook whose American edition that had to be fully reprinted given all the measure conversions were off having been left to an inexperienced translator? An expensive faux pas to also avoid with your restaurant website and menus.
AI won’t help either. Like cookbooks, menus and websites are too complicated for copying and pasting regurgitated bits of translation from the net.
Here are 10 basic points the Spanish translator of your website or menu will need to take into account to produce a useful and appealing translation:
- your business style, voice and tone, the image you want to portray into the world
- the style of your dishes
- whether the diner is familiar with the ingredients or not
- whether the diner is familiar with you and your business or not
- clarity
- coherence
- cultural differences
- humour
- space restrictions
- SEO (search engine optimisation techniques) in the case of your website
So, let your customers remember you by the originality of your food, menu and website instead of the translation slips on your menu and lacklustre website.
